Category: Life

When I quit my antidepressant medication, I was mostly hopeful but a little afraid. Would this be the time my boyfriend gives up on me being a dark-thought disaster queen? Would I spend my days in the black pool of despair that is my depressed mind? Would my anxiety keep me from leaving home or making a phone call? So much uncertainty. I’ve had to take a lot of steps to deal with this medication-free....

In the summer of 1999 I was a 14-year-old goth girl with baggy pants and a weird hairdo when I smoked my first cigarette. My friend Lisa and I would walk to the mall and bum cigarettes from smoking strangers in the food court. We’d collect a mishmash of different brand cigarettes and share them. Back then, I remember little tin ashtrays on every table. Lisa stopped smoking shortly after that. I didn’t. I remember...

CHILDHOOD I started writing poetry when I was 9 years old. Nobody ever told me to do it, I simply felt compelled to create a tangible representation of what went on in my young head. As a kid suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), I had a lot of emotions flowing through me: anger and fear being major players. I spent a lot of time alone, and I spent a lot of time writing....

Sometimes I like to just sit in a crowded public place and listen. Listen to the bustle of the crowd; catch snippets of conversation in passing. Listen and watch. You learn a lot about people that way. I like to sit in a restaurant and watch people. Based on what I see of their body language, notice about their physical presentation, and hear of their conversations, I construct elaborate back stories about their lives in...

I find myself needing a reminder every now and then that it’s not a failure to feel this way. It’s okay to feel like you’re a piece of shit sometimes. It’s okay to feel like giving up – roll credits, the film is over. It’s okay to be weak, to feel ashamed and fall inside myself to drown a while. Sometimes I forget that I’ve had a hell of a ride and that I’ve been...

Sometimes in life the only appropriate response is to throw your hands up in the air to admit defeat. Standing on the bow of a sinking ship isn’t going to do you any favors. The same goes for relationships. We all make decisions in life, and we tend to choose the paths that make our lives better in some way. Everybody wants to be happy and we all hold different recipe cards. Every now and...

In life, nothing is ever certain. You could drop dead at any moment, or live to see 100. Life can turn on a dime, and there is often no way to prepare for or alter the direction a path takes. This is never more true than when it comes to the people we walk those paths with. Whether it’s a friend, a lover, a life partner or even a family member, nobody is permanent. This...

I consider myself to be among the elders of Generation Internet, AKA Generation Y… or X depending on who you ask. I used Yahoo before Google existed. I learned HTML coding in high school. I hung out in IRC chat rooms and used ICQ messenger. I remember when 128MB was huge and it took a week to download a single song through IRC (as long as the person you were downloading it from didn’t go...

Do people change? I think there are always some aspects of ourselves that we can change, and others that are hard coded into our DNA. One thing that’s for certain is that each and every one of us is always evolving. We gather new information about the world and draw from our experiences, and we grow. Sometimes this happens slowly and gradually over the course of many years, and other times a significant event can...

From a young age I heard from nearly everyone in my life, “You should be creating art for a living.”, and for a long time, I did. I drew portraits. I created knitting patterns. I made soap. I wrote. I utilized my creative skills in a way that paid the bills. I was unhappy. People are multifaceted, and if you start doing what you love for a living, it can quickly become all you do....